Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

That lab allowed Gates to take enormous tax write-offs but never produced any scientific or tecnological break-throughs. But hey, it was all in good tax-dodging fun, right?

Tax write-off and tax dodging? What the heck? That's like you donating $100 to the Red Cross to get $15 back in tax refund. Not to even mention all the payroll taxes that people working in Microsoft pay. MS would be way better off just stashing the money like Apple does.

Your post is utterly moronic. What is it about Microsoft that turns otherwise smart people into f**king morons?

It's interesting how it's Apple that mostly did everything and how the summary led people like you to mention only Microsoft. Typical biased Slashdot bullshit.Not to mention other companies are part of Rockstar like RIM, EMC, Ericsson, Sony. Apple bought some patents from Rockstart in 2012 for like $1B.

By the fifth round of bidding, it was Rockstar Bidco that decided not to submit a bid. This brought the group of bidders down to three: Google, Apple, and Intel.

Then something really interesting happened.

Following Rockstar’s seeming exit, Apple asked Nortel for permission to talk to the group about a possible partnership. This request was granted. Following these discussions, Apple decided they wanted to partner with Rockstar and adopt their name and transaction structure.

Essentially, Apple decided to stake the Rockstar group in this high-stakes poker game.

To get around this, MS can sell a hardware dongle that costs $$$ that happens to come with free Windows, and Windows only runs if that hardware dongle is present. That way they can do the same thing that Apple does.

What about multiuser systems that are used as remote desktops? What about privilege separation? Why should a user logged into a machine be able to read keystrokes of all the others even though they're a normal user and not root? That doesn't happen with Windows.

So now we have "Windows" isn't "Windows" argument? Look, Microsoft has kept the basic features of "windows" including how the user interface operates all the way though from 3.1.1. They have brought along a lot of baggage in the process. People, users, administrators expect that the next version will work much like the current one. I remember the jump to NT, what a mess. But Microsoft had no choice but to break a lot of expected behavior though the years, many times for security reasons, but they bring a lot of the baggage along and are forced into compromises in security in the effort to keep their user base. They couldn't just make the changes they needed to, or a lot of folks would have bailed to Linux, which had the security, and wasn't in need of change.

Yes, "Windows XP" wasn't the next version of the "Windows ME" codebase and doesn't have it.

Similar UI != same code basejust likeReact OS != Windows XP

Server OS != Desktop OS

Server use cases and audience != Desktop use cases and audience

Compare CentOS with Windows Server.

If you want a further locked down machine and featureless default install, there's Windows Server Core.

It's like me complaining that Linux comes with Amazon ads preinstalled and uploads search keywords to Canonical(like it does in Ubuntu) while Windows comes with a heavily restricted browser that doesn't even run JavaScript or download files without a lot of tweaking(Windows Server).

Do you remember DOS? Windows 3.1.1? Security was woefully lacking, it wasn't even a concern. At the same time, Linux was being developed, with the security model it has today, mostly unchanged. Windows has gong though many revisions and changes in the security design from ZERO security and no such thing as having separate user accounts to where we are now. Linux started out, very similar to what it is now.

Please stop repeating that, it stopped being true as of 10 years ago since Windows ME was the last OS based on DOS/Win 3.1.1 code.

XP, Vista, 7 and 8 are all based on the Windows NT family which was developed with security in mind and separate user accounts etc.

Windows boxes? They come out of the install process wide open with a whole raft of dangerous services turned on.

Can you list what dangerous services are turned on by default on a Windows Server install? If you don't it's a pretty sign that you have no clue about what you're talking about and last used Windows about 15 years ago.